The result will be called "OOHTML5", and the standards groups will be able to do nothing, apart from what they normally do: Let Microsoft sit in and influence (drag-and-delay) the standards meetings/discussions, and then when the conclusion is released, look at it and go "Huh? We never saw any of this... We must have been out with the flu that day or something. What's this 'addEventListener()' nonsense?' And all of these CSS se-lec-tors? Screw ya'll, we're going home".
To me the really interesting question is this:
Suppose that the "good guys" win. There's a big bump in FF/Webkit usage and developers begin to drop support for IE (in its current, "this is how we do things here" incarnation). Does Microsoft have a plan B? Do they have a fast, competent, compliant, cross-platform browser stashed in the garage? They certainly have the manpower to pull it off (Visual Studio.NET is considered a miracle, even by FOSS advocates), but have they been working on something like that in the background, as an alternative, or will they have to start from scratch, and pretty much reallocate entire divisions to start machining a completely new browser?
I don't want people who doesn't have power/basic knowledge to install a compliant browser to be my customers anyway.
Nice job if you can get it...
The rest of us are stuck with the "graceful degradation" (what a wonderful oxymoron that is) that's required if the browser is determined to be IE. The major problem is that when you want to *move forward* -- start using powerful CSS, canvas, and actually have a JavaScript engine that can run JS, as opposed to "crawl" it. In these cases you don't have much of a choice -- you either give up on functionality that's core to the app that you're designing, or give IE users the finger and tell them that their browser, and by extension (usually) the organization that forces them to use that browser and doesn't give them the ability to install anything else, is/are obsolete.
The amount of code that can be removed from a web app if you give the condition (!msie) is incredible. This is why more libraries do a check at initialization to determine if they're dealing with IE or "anything else", and then dynamically load the code for that environment.
I've started implementing a third condition to that: Is the browser non-IE && FF3+ || webkit (some chrome/safari feature sniffing) || Opera (again, some feature sniffing to see if it's from the past ~year). In these cases, the amount of code that's needed to be brought in, and the amount of bureaucracy that needs to be handled at runtime drops like a stone. The latest batch of browsers are amazingly fast and compliant.
Glossary:
GC: Garbage Collection
FS: File System
BTRFS: B-tree File System
NILFS: New Implementation of a Log structured File System
(I had to look NILFS up though...)
I think this is the equivalent of an Ox shaking off flies with its ears.
"Yeah yeah, competition... Sure, disclosure, whatever... Stop bothering me, I'm eating"
(and if you're thinking of Ballmer while reading the word "Ox", that's your mind, not mine...)
Even if you did need MS Office, who buys that at retail price? Either you're working somewhere and you get a company-discount, or you're studying and have access to the student version/s. Also, so many companies are migrating to Google Docs it's alarming. I used to be the weirdo that didn't have Office installed on every machine (I usually only had it installed on one at a time -- just to do document conversions). Now when people see that I have Open Office installed they give me the "what's that for?" look.
And, while I completely agree with the above about Elements and an anti-virus, even if you *did* want to pay for these things (which, again, you really don't have to these days), AVG is $55, and Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is available for $65 if you wait for the happens-5-times-a-year "special discount".
Oh, and at least on a Windows machine you don't have to buy a new OS every year (with the current exception of the Vista-Win7 crap...)
First of all, every OS has support costs. If a manufacturer chooses to place a distro on a machine, they have to support the entire package, not just the hardware. You're right about OSX, since it's specifically tailored and hardware-bound, but Linux distros are definitely something that MS can compete against in a financial arena. This is especially true for corporate computers where you need an IT infrastructure. The $0 price tag that's attached to Linux only helps you until you first boot up the machine. From that point onward, someone has to support the OS that's running on that hardware. Microsoft has a gargantuan training and support structure they can offer to customers. No single distro would be able to compete with it if we're talking about people running Linux on the desktop (again, especially within a company). The support costs over the span of 3 years (usual life expectancy for a PC) would accumulate much faster in a Linux environment. It's the "price" of running an OS that too few people are used to, and are trained on.
As a side note, I'm hoping that the move-to-the-cloud will change people's perception of operating systems, expecting them to be "slimmer" and "out of the way", allowing Linux/BSD to gain market share since they're lean by design, and more secure.
I'm more compelled to ask for details than mod this 'troll'. What, specifically, would you be looking for in order for an OS to be a "UNIX variant"? Also, which part of the OS are you referring to? The entire stack? Do OpenBSD/FreeBSD constitute Unix variants? I'm going to assume you don't mean the kernel itself, nor are you referring to the windowing system/s. Care you elaborate?
I didn't mention anything regarding hand-coding SVG. Of course it's simpler to do it, if you do it manually. If you're used to XML/HTML and CSS, then it's a breeze. It also allows you to define a graphic structure and tweak it using far less code, since, naturally, Canvas is just an interface, not a document, meaning you'd have to stack javascript commands (a bit like postscript).
When I said "ready-made SVG" that included documents that were created/tweaked manually. But if you have to create a document from scratch, using javascript, then you're going to have to use the DOM, with all of the mess that comes with it (there are javascript SVG libs designed to help with exactly that, but it's still relatively verbose).
I don't consider the two standards as 'competing' for the same use. There's some overlap, sure, but SVG is a document with an implementation standard, while Canvas is just a single tag that provides you with an API to directly manipulate bits within a given area of a display. That's another difference, BTW -- canvas lets you do bitmap(raster) editing, while SVG allows you to define printing properties (though CSS).
They're different tools for different purposes -- my only assertion is that canvas will (and already has) see faster adoption because of its simplicity. But there's no doubt in my mind that once Google decides to implement Google Maps in vector form, it would be nuts to do so using canvas. That's something that SVG is perfectly suited for. Right now you'd see most SVG online on Wikipedia, since it's adopted it for static graphical representations (it prints to scale, or at least on a browser that's working properly it's supposed to). Basically: complementary, not competing.
I managed to try it out while it was posted on the firehose, and the very initial impression was good. Gradually, however, I noticed that it was just dumping data on my lap, and left it up to me to sort it out. It reminded me a bit of Wolfram Alpha, except half of the information was wrong (and if I gave it names, most of the information was wrong).
Even within the presentation, they point out the flaw of having to sift through the mess and pick out the irrelevant information.
I don't think it's useless, I mean it does provide you with many links that you'd normally not get on other search engines, at least when you enter something unique as a query. But as far as actually placing relevant information in brackets (location:... history:... personal-information:...), it doesn't do a very good job.
Also, if something is truly unique, you'll get a better result in wikipedia anyway (in terms of how its arranged, anyway). And if you want more accurate info dumps, Wolfram Alpha currently does it better.
First of all, Google placing its weight behind it is serious business.
As far as browser support goes, Firefox 3.5 has a huge amount of HTML5 implemented, and so do Webkit-based browsers (meaning Chrome and Safari). Opera is on the way, and since HTML5 is in its final stages, it won't take them look to make that last push.
What that means is that every browser *except* for IE will have support for HTML5 by the end of the year. Remember that most people who use a non-IE browser upgrade to the latest version very fast (Chrome practically forces you to, since it upgrades without asking, and Apple is extremely aggressive in having its customers on the latest version of each of their software packages).
In other words, if you're developing something new *now*, you'd be foolish to ignore HTML5 features. It will simply place you behind everyone else in the race.
True, but Apple takes a different approach. It's never going to be truly dominant because its business model, or maybe I should say "company culture", is that of a fashion company. They're selling a brand that people buy and identify with, not unlike clothing brands (I'd cite a few, but I go around in shorts and flip-flops). They don't allow anything into their walled garden that they haven't personally approved -- see iPhone/iPod software/hardware. I'd go so far as to say that they're not *interested* in replacing Microsoft, nor getting into large corporations. Fundamentally, they're (and this will get me modded "troll") elitists. They like to have a large crowd of people to look down upon with scorn. They don't *want* to go mainstream, not in the "Windows XP" sense of mainstream.
I really wish I had more time then I do now... I could write a dissertation on the SVG/Canvas dilemma. Yes, I've used them both for animation. Here goes:
SVG is wonderful to generate on the backend, or with client-side apps. It's the better solution for larger, more complicated vector graphics that don't have to be animated -- maps, charts, graphs, and visual structure representation (including CAD output). In order to animate SVG on a lower-level, you really must write a decent-size JS "library" to deal with all the DOM insertions and modifications. If you have set-pieces which you want to move, for example you have a ready-made SVG of a car and a ready-made SVG of a racetrack, then SVG will be your first choice for turning that into an in-browser game. Whenever you have previously-created vector graphics elements, that need to (primarily) be moved around and slightly modified, then SVG is the better solution.
Canvas is low-level, inherently. That means that the assumption is that in most cases you *don't* have previously-created graphics, and that you're generating everything you're about to display -- on the fly. This includes custom user controls, dynamic visualizations(flow, growth, timeline, mathematical representations, etc.), and elements that are to be generated once and then placed around the site, as part of the usual DOM. One example that comes to mind is the Bespin project, where the entire GUI is one huge canvas element, because everything must be generated in real-time, from scratch. Another advantage that canvas has is speed, as can be seen on the Chrome Experiments page.
If it were up to me, I'd happily use both standards in the browser. But it's not. Currently, both Firefox and Webkit-based browsers (Safari, Chrome) support Canvas, with Opera on the way to completing the spec implementation (I think the latest beta versions may already support it). Effectively, this leaves only IE, in which you can get canvas (partially) using explorercanvas.
It's a matter of adoption. Canvas is way ahead, even though it's a much younger standard. The reason is that SVG is a massive standard, which is especially difficult to implement in a browser.
That's true, and it's why Inkscape uses SVG to store static vector information. SVG is XML-based, making it very easy to parse (there are tons of libraries in practically every language to parse XML), and supports CSS, which is also has widespread support. The problem isn't with static graphics, it's with animations. If you want to design an interactive control to use in a browser, you'll going to need 5-times the amount of code to do so in SVG than you would in Canvas, and it'll be both slower, and supported on fewer systems.
The Canvas spec is smaller (much smaller compared to SVG), easier to implement, and is already supported on Firefox and Webkit-based browsers. This is the most practical advantage it has -- availability in the field.
SVG is good for (mostly-)static vector graphics. While it was designed with a DOM and proper handlers in place to facilitate animation, in practice it's A) not fast enough and B) a very, *very* large standard.
If you want to see Canvas used for animation, check out the Chrome Experiments page. Most of the animation there is done using Canvas. It's a smaller standard, and it's very close to already-implemented 2D-model engines, like cairo.
There's actually no "Present Participle" for making/molding/pressing dies. The action itself is usually "pressing", "blanking", or "broaching". More information here.
On a side note, the Bengal tiger is quite intelligent and resourceful. I wouldn't be surprised if they did decide to go into the manufacturing business.
Slashdot Mirror
Laugh all you want. At least IE has broad developer support.
The result will be called "OOHTML5", and the standards groups will be able to do nothing, apart from what they normally do: Let Microsoft sit in and influence (drag-and-delay) the standards meetings/discussions, and then when the conclusion is released, look at it and go "Huh? We never saw any of this... We must have been out with the flu that day or something. What's this 'addEventListener()' nonsense?' And all of these CSS se-lec-tors? Screw ya'll, we're going home".
To me the really interesting question is this: .NET is considered a miracle, even by FOSS advocates), but have they been working on something like that in the background, as an alternative, or will they have to start from scratch, and pretty much reallocate entire divisions to start machining a completely new browser?
Suppose that the "good guys" win. There's a big bump in FF/Webkit usage and developers begin to drop support for IE (in its current, "this is how we do things here" incarnation). Does Microsoft have a plan B? Do they have a fast, competent, compliant, cross-platform browser stashed in the garage? They certainly have the manpower to pull it off (Visual Studio
I don't want people who doesn't have power/basic knowledge to install a compliant browser to be my customers anyway.
Nice job if you can get it...
The rest of us are stuck with the "graceful degradation" (what a wonderful oxymoron that is) that's required if the browser is determined to be IE. The major problem is that when you want to *move forward* -- start using powerful CSS, canvas, and actually have a JavaScript engine that can run JS, as opposed to "crawl" it. In these cases you don't have much of a choice -- you either give up on functionality that's core to the app that you're designing, or give IE users the finger and tell them that their browser, and by extension (usually) the organization that forces them to use that browser and doesn't give them the ability to install anything else, is/are obsolete.
The amount of code that can be removed from a web app if you give the condition (!msie) is incredible. This is why more libraries do a check at initialization to determine if they're dealing with IE or "anything else", and then dynamically load the code for that environment.
I've started implementing a third condition to that: Is the browser non-IE && FF3+ || webkit (some chrome/safari feature sniffing) || Opera (again, some feature sniffing to see if it's from the past ~year). In these cases, the amount of code that's needed to be brought in, and the amount of bureaucracy that needs to be handled at runtime drops like a stone. The latest batch of browsers are amazingly fast and compliant.
And also:
MILF: Moro Islamic Liberation Front
Glossary:
GC: Garbage Collection
FS: File System
BTRFS: B-tree File System
NILFS: New Implementation of a Log structured File System
(I had to look NILFS up though...)
aw man, you beat me to it. Still, Tash can mean more than one thing.
What I'm inferring from the context within the sentence is that "take-out-the-tash" means he wishes to assassinate Rico Smith.
I think this is the equivalent of an Ox shaking off flies with its ears.
"Yeah yeah, competition... Sure, disclosure, whatever... Stop bothering me, I'm eating"
(and if you're thinking of Ballmer while reading the word "Ox", that's your mind, not mine...)
Even if you did need MS Office, who buys that at retail price? Either you're working somewhere and you get a company-discount, or you're studying and have access to the student version/s. Also, so many companies are migrating to Google Docs it's alarming. I used to be the weirdo that didn't have Office installed on every machine (I usually only had it installed on one at a time -- just to do document conversions). Now when people see that I have Open Office installed they give me the "what's that for?" look.
And, while I completely agree with the above about Elements and an anti-virus, even if you *did* want to pay for these things (which, again, you really don't have to these days), AVG is $55, and Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is available for $65 if you wait for the happens-5-times-a-year "special discount".
Oh, and at least on a Windows machine you don't have to buy a new OS every year (with the current exception of the Vista-Win7 crap...)
First of all, every OS has support costs. If a manufacturer chooses to place a distro on a machine, they have to support the entire package, not just the hardware. You're right about OSX, since it's specifically tailored and hardware-bound, but Linux distros are definitely something that MS can compete against in a financial arena. This is especially true for corporate computers where you need an IT infrastructure. The $0 price tag that's attached to Linux only helps you until you first boot up the machine. From that point onward, someone has to support the OS that's running on that hardware. Microsoft has a gargantuan training and support structure they can offer to customers. No single distro would be able to compete with it if we're talking about people running Linux on the desktop (again, especially within a company). The support costs over the span of 3 years (usual life expectancy for a PC) would accumulate much faster in a Linux environment. It's the "price" of running an OS that too few people are used to, and are trained on.
As a side note, I'm hoping that the move-to-the-cloud will change people's perception of operating systems, expecting them to be "slimmer" and "out of the way", allowing Linux/BSD to gain market share since they're lean by design, and more secure.
I'm more compelled to ask for details than mod this 'troll'. What, specifically, would you be looking for in order for an OS to be a "UNIX variant"? Also, which part of the OS are you referring to? The entire stack? Do OpenBSD/FreeBSD constitute Unix variants? I'm going to assume you don't mean the kernel itself, nor are you referring to the windowing system/s. Care you elaborate?
But in Soviet Russia, Auto Spam Translation Kicks You!
I didn't mention anything regarding hand-coding SVG. Of course it's simpler to do it, if you do it manually. If you're used to XML/HTML and CSS, then it's a breeze. It also allows you to define a graphic structure and tweak it using far less code, since, naturally, Canvas is just an interface, not a document, meaning you'd have to stack javascript commands (a bit like postscript).
When I said "ready-made SVG" that included documents that were created/tweaked manually. But if you have to create a document from scratch, using javascript, then you're going to have to use the DOM, with all of the mess that comes with it (there are javascript SVG libs designed to help with exactly that, but it's still relatively verbose).
I don't consider the two standards as 'competing' for the same use. There's some overlap, sure, but SVG is a document with an implementation standard, while Canvas is just a single tag that provides you with an API to directly manipulate bits within a given area of a display. That's another difference, BTW -- canvas lets you do bitmap(raster) editing, while SVG allows you to define printing properties (though CSS).
They're different tools for different purposes -- my only assertion is that canvas will (and already has) see faster adoption because of its simplicity. But there's no doubt in my mind that once Google decides to implement Google Maps in vector form, it would be nuts to do so using canvas. That's something that SVG is perfectly suited for. Right now you'd see most SVG online on Wikipedia, since it's adopted it for static graphical representations (it prints to scale, or at least on a browser that's working properly it's supposed to). Basically: complementary, not competing.
I managed to try it out while it was posted on the firehose, and the very initial impression was good. Gradually, however, I noticed that it was just dumping data on my lap, and left it up to me to sort it out. It reminded me a bit of Wolfram Alpha, except half of the information was wrong (and if I gave it names, most of the information was wrong).
Even within the presentation, they point out the flaw of having to sift through the mess and pick out the irrelevant information.
I don't think it's useless, I mean it does provide you with many links that you'd normally not get on other search engines, at least when you enter something unique as a query. But as far as actually placing relevant information in brackets (location:... history:... personal-information:...), it doesn't do a very good job.
Also, if something is truly unique, you'll get a better result in wikipedia anyway (in terms of how its arranged, anyway). And if you want more accurate info dumps, Wolfram Alpha currently does it better.
First of all, Google placing its weight behind it is serious business.
As far as browser support goes, Firefox 3.5 has a huge amount of HTML5 implemented, and so do Webkit-based browsers (meaning Chrome and Safari). Opera is on the way, and since HTML5 is in its final stages, it won't take them look to make that last push.
What that means is that every browser *except* for IE will have support for HTML5 by the end of the year. Remember that most people who use a non-IE browser upgrade to the latest version very fast (Chrome practically forces you to, since it upgrades without asking, and Apple is extremely aggressive in having its customers on the latest version of each of their software packages).
In other words, if you're developing something new *now*, you'd be foolish to ignore HTML5 features. It will simply place you behind everyone else in the race.
True, but Apple takes a different approach. It's never going to be truly dominant because its business model, or maybe I should say "company culture", is that of a fashion company. They're selling a brand that people buy and identify with, not unlike clothing brands (I'd cite a few, but I go around in shorts and flip-flops). They don't allow anything into their walled garden that they haven't personally approved -- see iPhone/iPod software/hardware. I'd go so far as to say that they're not *interested* in replacing Microsoft, nor getting into large corporations. Fundamentally, they're (and this will get me modded "troll") elitists. They like to have a large crowd of people to look down upon with scorn. They don't *want* to go mainstream, not in the "Windows XP" sense of mainstream.
Now go ahead, flame me to bits.
It was supposed to be a joke, and yet most responses here nitpick that it's not a practical solution...
Next time I'll add:
</humor>
JK ;)
LoLz!
And imagine a beyowulf cluster of these!
I really wish I had more time then I do now... I could write a dissertation on the SVG/Canvas dilemma. Yes, I've used them both for animation. Here goes:
SVG is wonderful to generate on the backend, or with client-side apps. It's the better solution for larger, more complicated vector graphics that don't have to be animated -- maps, charts, graphs, and visual structure representation (including CAD output). In order to animate SVG on a lower-level, you really must write a decent-size JS "library" to deal with all the DOM insertions and modifications. If you have set-pieces which you want to move, for example you have a ready-made SVG of a car and a ready-made SVG of a racetrack, then SVG will be your first choice for turning that into an in-browser game. Whenever you have previously-created vector graphics elements, that need to (primarily) be moved around and slightly modified, then SVG is the better solution.
Canvas is low-level, inherently. That means that the assumption is that in most cases you *don't* have previously-created graphics, and that you're generating everything you're about to display -- on the fly. This includes custom user controls, dynamic visualizations(flow, growth, timeline, mathematical representations, etc.), and elements that are to be generated once and then placed around the site, as part of the usual DOM. One example that comes to mind is the Bespin project, where the entire GUI is one huge canvas element, because everything must be generated in real-time, from scratch. Another advantage that canvas has is speed, as can be seen on the Chrome Experiments page.
If it were up to me, I'd happily use both standards in the browser. But it's not. Currently, both Firefox and Webkit-based browsers (Safari, Chrome) support Canvas, with Opera on the way to completing the spec implementation (I think the latest beta versions may already support it). Effectively, this leaves only IE, in which you can get canvas (partially) using explorercanvas.
It's a matter of adoption. Canvas is way ahead, even though it's a much younger standard. The reason is that SVG is a massive standard, which is especially difficult to implement in a browser.
In that case, Google is completely nuts.
Yes.
Step 1) Download Firefox using FTP: instructions.
Step 2) Use Firefox to download Opera.
(you can probably use the method above to directly download Opera, but I'm too lazy to figure out how right now)
That's true, and it's why Inkscape uses SVG to store static vector information. SVG is XML-based, making it very easy to parse (there are tons of libraries in practically every language to parse XML), and supports CSS, which is also has widespread support. The problem isn't with static graphics, it's with animations. If you want to design an interactive control to use in a browser, you'll going to need 5-times the amount of code to do so in SVG than you would in Canvas, and it'll be both slower, and supported on fewer systems.
The Canvas spec is smaller (much smaller compared to SVG), easier to implement, and is already supported on Firefox and Webkit-based browsers. This is the most practical advantage it has -- availability in the field.
SVG is good for (mostly-)static vector graphics. While it was designed with a DOM and proper handlers in place to facilitate animation, in practice it's A) not fast enough and B) a very, *very* large standard.
If you want to see Canvas used for animation, check out the Chrome Experiments page. Most of the animation there is done using Canvas. It's a smaller standard, and it's very close to already-implemented 2D-model engines, like cairo.
What are you talking about? I use Unicode all the æ±åOE--å...çSæ-ç'åå¦ããï¼OE2åæãRubyã'ç"ããYåYæoeçsããf--ãfããf©ãfYãfãã'å...ä®ç'ç®ãã--ã¦ãããèç®--æ©YæSè"è...ã'ç®æOEã(TM)ãYãã®è義ããçããSï¼OEãã"ããääã'éèOEã(TM)ãæéã®çãçã¦ï¼OEèfãæ-ï¼OEãfãfãf¼ãfæ-æã®æææã'æ±ãå¦ãããã"ãã'ç®çsãã--ã¦ããã
There's actually no "Present Participle" for making/molding/pressing dies. The action itself is usually "pressing", "blanking", or "broaching". More information here.
On a side note, the Bengal tiger is quite intelligent and resourceful. I wouldn't be surprised if they did decide to go into the manufacturing business.